By Hank Reineke
My earliest introduction to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
immortal Faust was not through the
original work of the revered German playwright. Perhaps original work is not
the best description of Goethe’s exploratory tragedy. The premise behind its conception – the
selling of one’s soul to the Devil for personal rewards and glorified ambition
- were based firmly in the tradition of austere Germanic folklore and accompanying
Teutonic condemnation. This allegorical fable
has formed the basis of so many subsequent films, books, and television scenarios,
that the concept has now passed into cliché.
My earliest encounter with a Faustian fable was likely Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1936 celebrated
short story The Devil and Daniel Webster. Benét’s tale transported the misguided and
tragic exchange of souls from Goethe’s grim, decaying German village to the
rugged hills and blue skies of New Hampshire. Benét’s short story was simply one more link in a long tradition. His tale was inspired by an earlier (1824) Washington
Irving short story also inarguably Faustian in execution.
One of my favorite films from childhood was RKO’s Academy
Award winning production of The Devil and
Daniel Webster (1941), which featured Walter Huston as the titular demon. If the fresh air setting of The Devil and Daniel Webster was
filtered almost completely through a prism of Americana, F.W. Murnau’s silent
epic Faust: a German Folktale (1926) is
most certainly its grim progenitor, one mirroring the darkest impulses of pre-War
Weimar Republic Germany. Working closely
from the storyboard charcoal sketches and ink and pencil concept drawings of his
imaginative expressionistic set designers Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, his
production of Faust Murnau would effectively
create a visually sodden and nightmarish world.
The film begins with a brilliantly choreographed
celestial argument between a gleaming, white-winged Archangel and a series of
Devils (the “Three Scourges of Hellâ€). The former champions the notion that man is essentially righteous and of
good will. The Devil’s cynically counter
– sadly, perhaps more realistically - that “No man can resist evil.†Choosing to test their argument, the Devil’s
wager they can tempt and transform a good man such as the humble, learned Faust
into a selfish, self-interested individual, motivated only by his personal
pleasures.
Faust (played by Swede Gösta Ekman) is a doctor and a
well-intentioned man of science, frail, elderly, and long-bearded. He is spending his golden years in a humble
garret, warmed by a hearth and surrounded by the piles of books accumulated over
a lifetime. These books, essentially,
signify the collective knowledge of man. Though he is also a dabbling alchemist, there’s no notion he’s
interested in the accumulation of gold in pursuit of riches and comfort. He’s more interested in the exacting exercise
of scientific formula.
Things immediately take a turn for the worse when, in a brilliant and haunting image, a looming, out-sized devil wraps a bat-winged cloak of black smoke and coal dust around the humble village where Faust resides. The black smoke metaphorically signifies the onset of plague, and within a few days time - demonstrated visually in a series of striking images - more than half of the town’s villagers have been stricken by disease.
The onset of pestilence brings out the two dualities of man, just as suggested by the Archangel and the devils. Those citizens of unwavering religious conviction petition their neighbors that they can only be saved from God’s judgment through prayer and repentance. The villager’s whose belief systems are non-existent, weakened or amoral and simply depraved, chose to spend their last days in salacious acts of merriment; they’re convinced their time on earth is not long, so they might as well make the most of it. In a desperate combing of his books and of his medicine cabinets, and in long nights of prayer in hopes of to arresting the spread of the disease, Faust seems an Old Testament Moses of a modern-age. Indeed, the anarchic revelries in the streets below bear striking similarities to the rebellion of the Israelite Dathan against Moses’ wishes.
It isn’t long before both prayer and medicine fail the good-willed Faust. The tipping point comes when he’s unable to save the mother of a bereaved young woman who has begged his intervention in saving her. Returning to his garret in despair, all the books containing man’s accumulated useless knowledge - as well as God’s own book - are tossed angrily into the hearth. As one book burns, the devils intervene and a flaming page of parchment advises that, should he choose to renounce God and all “celestial figuresâ€, he will not only triumph over the plague and save his neighbors, but he will also achieve an enviable station of personal glories.
As further enticement, he is advised that he may back out of his agreement with the Devil within twenty-four hours. The passing of the day will be measured by the steady drop of sand through an hourglass. Determined to save his neighbors at any cost, the anxious Faust reluctantly agrees, signing a binding blood pact with Mephisto (Emil Jannings) himself. As promised, he is passed the secrets of a cure and the grateful townspeople rush to him seeking comfort. Though his bargain has allowed him to heal the sick and feed the poor of the village, he finds he can no longer be in the presence of such religious imagery as the cross. The villagers soon take note of this and- outraged by the unholy covenant he has made- throw stones at him. With his spirit broken and his awareness of his pact with the Devil now consequentially calculated, a beleaguered Faust returns to his garret and attempts suicide.
He’s saved only by Mephisto’s self-interested intervention. The Devil brandishes a mirror in which Faust reflects not as the aged codger he is, but as the handsome young man he once was. It’s here the Devil’s celestial argument that “No man can resist evil†becomes evident. In a series of episodic events, Mephisto promises Faust that he can enjoy the splendors of anything – or anyone – he wants. He eventually succumbs to the corruptible moral temptations laid before him, unaware that Mephisto is merely marking time, keeping Faust busily occupied with sinful rewards while he waits on the last grain of sand to pass through the bottleneck of the hourglass.
It’s only once his soul has passed to the Devil’s ledger that Faust comes to terms with what he has done. He asks, and is granted, the simple wish to revisit the peace and simple splendors of his old hometown. He arrives in his village on Easter Sunday of all days, where outside of a pious church celebrating the resurrection, he immediately falls in love with the innocent, dove-eyed beauty, Gretchen. Suffice to say the interpolation of their lives will not end well.
Though Murnau had originally envisioned such players as Mary Philbin, Lillian Gish and Greta Garbo for the role, Gretchen is beautifully played by the German actress Camilla Horn. Murnau, by all accounts, was a demanding taskmaster, meticulously choreographing every nuanced physical movement of his troupe, subjecting both cast and crew to interminably long working days and nights under blistering mercury lights. Murnau was especially ruthless in getting the best performance from the novice Horn. He had her bound for hours on end - in authentic iron chains - to a stake, not allowing her to eat until she was famished. Murnau would continually tap into her psyche and have her revisit the lowest moments of her young life so that internal grief might better transfer to her somber face and be more reflective of pain and deprivation.
The special effects are wonderful and inventive for a film of this vintage. During one episode, Faust and Mephisto take flight on the flapping tails of the devil’s cloak. Murnau employs wonderfully evocative swooping eagle-eyed tracking shots over grim cityscapes, thatched rooftops, snow capped mountain peaks, rivers and valleys of collapsed trees. The scene when the desperate Faust conjures the Devil on the crossroads is lit only by an eerie oval shaped moon. The Devil’s arrival is staged by a gathering of smoke, lightning, and a somber fire that never quite illuminates but deepens the ominous darkness. The bolt lightning touching earth from the dark heaven above suggests the arrival of the ultimate evil spirit on earth.
Murnau’s compositional photography style is nearly without peer. Static scenes are staged in such an evocative and visually stimulating manner that the frame compositions mimic the best stylistic sensibilities of a gifted artist’s portraitures. This was clearly intentional as Murnau was deeply immersed in the art world. Many of his images were crafted from and directly inspired and staged to mimic images suggested by classic wood cuttings, frescos, prints, painting and sculpture.
Though the imagery of the Archangel and Devil sparring in the heavens are brilliant and never less than other-worldly, the images that linger long after the film ends are the simpler, more earth bound ones. There’s a beautiful image of the shivering Gretchen limping forlornly through a village snowstorm, cradling her bastard infant in her arms. To achieve the photographic effect of a Gretchen breaking physically and mentally under the assault of a blistering snow storm, Murnau had arranged for piles of salt to be blown by powerful fans into her face. Horn later allowed in a memoir that this particular special effect was painful to endure as the bombard of salt pellets caused her painful facial bruising.
It’s Gretchen who pays the highest cost for Faust’s bargain with the Devil. She begs for someone – anyone - to offer a modicum of kindness or pity for her child’s well-being – but she’s merely scolded and spurned for being the shamed woman in the stocks. Following her arrest for complicity in the death of her infant child, Murnau tightens the noose of his compositional frame and we see the mentally distressed Gretchen, splayed out on a bed of straw. She waits for her execution on the floor in a narrow prison cell, mournfully cradling empty space as if she still carried the dead infant in her arms. It’s a pitiful and harrowing image.
The German actor Emil Jannings (Waxworks, The Last Laugh) plays the character of Mephisto with, ahem, devilish relish. He had been Murnau’s natural choice for the role from the beginning, having already played the character on celebrated stage productions of the Goethe classic. Though he’s been charged to portray the personification of evil on earth, Jannings’ portrayal of Heaven’s farthest fallen angel is amazingly textured. Though sly and manipulative, Jannings’ Mephisto conversely appears to be seductively friendly and accommodating. He’s charming and even charitable with his clients - if only as a deceptive gesture to serve his own ends.
Digitally restored in high-definition from various 35mm prints, this Kino-Lorber Classics version is as close to a definitive edition as one can hope to find. In the illuminative and essential accompanying documentary The Language of Shadows: Faust, the filmmakers demonstrate that in the 1920s the version of this masterwork moviegoers were actually privileged to view was based solely on geography. It was Murnau’s modus operandi to shoot and re-shoot nearly every scene in multiple takes from a two camera set up. When footage was later blended and assembled into a work print, the interposition of the two caused inconsistency in the film’s timing as the two cameras utilized had been manually hand-cranked and not synched. Later, producers and distributors took the film - originally photographed at twenty frames per second – and sped it up to twenty-four frames per second.
His work having attracted the notice of Hollywood film bosses - and his interest piqued in making films abroad in the United States - Murnau chose to assemble the best of the multi-framed takes from his negatives for American and German audiences. The French negative is seemingly the most woeful of surviving international versions, the usually perfection-minded Murnau delivering to Paris a version suffering from inserts containing on-set gaffes and bumbled outtakes. The Language of Shadows is an essential companion to better understand the film’s unusual construction, as the documentarians share fascinating split screen comparisons of various sequences as viewed by differing audiences worldwide. Through the years even the U.S. and German prints would become corrupted as damage to original negatives caused the replacement of Murnau’s selected best original footage with inferior outtakes.
Happily, this Kino Lorber Classics combo Blu Ray/DVD edition of Faust: a German Folktale offers a “meticulous restoration of the original German version†in a reconstructed running time of one hundred and seven minutes. The film is presented in a 1:33:1 ratio and 120x1080p, with a 2.0 stereo track and with its original German language inter-titles and removable English subtitles. Special features include the fifty-three documentary The Language of Shadows: Faust as well as test footage culled from the Library of Congress of “Ernst Lubitisch’s abandoned production of Marguerite and Faust (also featuring Camilla Horn). This edition of Faust benefits greatly from Javier Perez de Azpeitia’s beautifully sensitive piano score, based on Paul Hensel’s 1926 Orchestral Arrangement. Both this score and an orchestral score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra are included as separate audio tracks for your listening pleasure.
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